Playwright ships multiple packages to NPM. All packages that are published to NPM are listed as folders under //packages/.
Playwright's root package.json is never published to NPM. It is only used for devmode, e.g. when running npm install with no arguments or installing from github.
Playwright dependencies for all packages are the same and are managed with the root package.json.
Playwright browser versions for all packages are the same and are managed with the browsers.json.

Note

As of May 20, 2020, the only exception is the playwright-electron package that doesn't follow the pack and is published manually. This is due to it's pre-1.0 status.

Building NPM package

To build a package that will be shipped to NPM, use //packages/build_package.js script. The script populates package folder with contents, and then uses npm pack to archive the folder.

As of May 20, 2020, //packages/build_package.js does the following:

copies certain files and folders from playwright-internal to the subpackage (e.g. //lib, //types, //LICENSE etc)
generates package.json and puts it in the subpackage
generates browsers.json and puts it in the subpackage
uses npm pack to pack the subpackage folder
removes all the files that were added during the process

To build playwright package and save result as ./playwright.tgz file:

./packages/build_package.js playwright ./playwright.tgz

To debug what files are put into the folder, use --no-cleanup flag and inspect the package folder:

./packages/build_package.js playwright ./playwright.tgz --no-cleanup
ls ./packages/playwright # inspect the folder

Testing packages

To test packages, use //packages/installation-tests/installation-tests.sh.

Publishing packages

All package publishing happens exclusively over CI/CD using the //utils/publish_all_packages.sh script.